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Antimatter Theory
Offers Incredible
Probabilities
Ever since Paul Dirac theorized the existence of anti-matter in 1928, there has been a sense among world physicists that all things in the universe must have an opposing
counterpart to preserve a necessary symmetry.
The discovery of positrons, the anti-matter equivalent of electrons, and the subsequent discoveries
of anti-protons and other anti particles since Dirac have not only proven the existence of opposite forces, but opened the
door to quantum physics.
Since Dirac, scientists have dared to consider the possibility of parallel universes, time travel, teleportation and many of the other things that once fell into the realm of science fiction.
This way of thinking may have been stimulated by science fiction writers, who were quick to exploit
the discovery of antimatter as a story plot. Writers, by-and-large, are creative right-brain users who have a way of tapping
into the human collective for information that may still be a future event waiting to happen. Thus, we should not be surprised
when science fiction plots created by Jules Verne and the many writers who followed start becoming reality. Remember it was Verne who envisioned submarines, men
traveling by rocket to the moon, and time travel. Two out of three of his predictions, while total fiction in their day, have
since come true.
After Dirac, the sci-fi writers had a field day with visions of antiworlds, antistars and antiuniverses,
all made of antimatter. Some envisioned the explosive power of joining antimatter with positive matter as energy to propel
starships that could travel faster than the speed of light.
When Robert Foot, a physics professor at the University of Melbourne, recently suggested that an
anti-matter, or "mirror matter" meteorite caused the 1908 mystery explosion that toppled trees for miles in Tunguska, Siberia, he opened a
new wave of thinking among scientists concerning the probability of parallel worlds.
Foot claims that mirror matter arises naturally as opposite symmetries of nature. Thus all matter
has its invisible mirror image moving in an opposite direction. There seem to be two thoughts concerning anti-matter. One
is that matter remains unchanged whether it moves forward or backward in time. The second thought is that nature doesn't distinguish
between right and left-handed orientations.
In a UPI story, science writer Mike Martin quoted Foot as saying that he believes space and time
are reversed for mirror matter. "Time moves backward and right-handed spatial coordinates have been interchanged with their
left-handed counterparts."
Thus we have a contemporary scientist not only suggesting that a parallel universe exists, but saying
it is one that is such an extreme opposite of the universe we live in, that even time is moving in the other direction.
This, of course, leads us into a strange hodge-podge of questions that, at least for now, have no
answer.
For example, if the mirror universe is moving backward in time, what is happening to the mirror
people there? Are they growing from old to young? Is that universe rushing toward a collapse which would be the opposite of
a Big Bang? And if and when this happens, does the mirror universe explode outward and a forward creation begin again, but
on the posi-side? And if we are a mirror of that universe, does our universe then turn into the negative image, with time
running backwards? In that case, what is now seen by us as antimatter, would suddenly become positive matter.
If there must be a mirror consisting of anti-matter for all matter in this universe, then we all
should have our exact mirror double on the other side of the mirror.
Lewis Carroll may have been on to something when he created the story of Alice In Wonderland, and
subtitled: Through The Looking Glass.
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